Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention generally relate to determining relevance of an entity in an entity resolution system, and more particularly, to a variety of techniques for assigning a degree of relevance to an entity by relationships to other relevant entities of an entity resolution system.
Description of the Related Art
In an entity resolution system, identity records are loaded and resolved against known identities to derive a network of entities and relationships between entities. An “entity” generally refers to an organizational unit used to store identity records that are resolved at a “zero-degree relationship.” That is, each identity record associated with a given entity is believed to describe the same person, place, or thing. Thus, one entity may reference multiple individual identities. This is frequently benign, e.g., in a case where an entity includes two identities, a first with identity records identifying a woman based on a familial surname and a second identity with records identifying the same woman based on a married surname. Of course, in other cases, multiple identities may be an indication of mischief or a problem, e.g., in a case where one individual is impersonating another, using a fictitious identity, or engaging in some form of identity theft. The entity resolution system may link entities to one another by relationships. For example, a first entity may have a 1st degree with a second entity based on identity records (in one entity, the other, or both) that indicate the individuals represented by these two entities are married to one another, reside at the same address, or share some other common information.
One task performed by an entity resolution system is to generate alerts when the existence of a particular identity record (typically the inbound record being processed) causes some condition to be satisfied that is relevant in some way and that may require additional scrutiny by an analyst. The result of these processes is typically a list of alerts about identities or entities that should be examined by an analyst. Relevance detection may be used to help identify potential threats and fraud as well as potential opportunity.
Additionally, entity resolution systems typically include (or are compatible with) an entity resolution alert analysis system that allow analysts to review and analyze alerts, entities, and identities, as well as provide comments or assign a disposition to alerts. In such systems, an assigned disposition often takes the form of a tagged value that provides an alert lifecycle (e.g., “NEW”, “OPEN”, “CLOSED”, “INVESTIGATING”, etc.).
Generally, an entity resolution system is adept at finding relationships between identity records (including zero-degree relationships where the two identity records are believed to be the same entity). Further, entity resolution systems typically use alerts to notify when a relevant relationship is found (e.g., “Criminal knows/is Employee”). Alerting can be based on criteria of the identity records, including, but not limited to, the assignment of roles to specific identity records (e.g., identity records loaded from an employee database may be tagged as “Employees,” while those loaded from an FBI most-wanted list may be tagged as “Criminals”). However, such an entity resolution system cannot determine an entity relevance score when the entity resolution system does not generate or track alerts (i.e., from which relevance may be derived).